Hell, Yes

Since the late 1990s, queer singer
/ songwriter Erin McKeown has been making a name for herself as a distinguished
performer with a rich and pure distinctive vocal style. McKeown expanded her
creative horizons with the stage musical Miss You Like Hell, a
collaboration with Quiara Alegría Hudes, for which she wrote the music and
lyrics. As you can hear on Miss You Like Hell: Original Cast Recording (Ghostlight),
the play is about the reunion between troubled mother and undocumented
immigrant Beatriz (Daphne Rubin-Vega), who is facing the prospect of
deportation, and her teenaged daughter Olivia (Gizel Jiménez) and the ensuing
eye-opening road trip on which the pair embark. I recently had the pleasure of
speaking with McKeown about the show and her work.

Gregg
Shapiro: Erin, you collaborated with Tony and Pulitzer Prize winning playwright
Quiara Alegría Hudes on Miss You Like Hell, which premiered at the
LaJolla Playhouse in 2016, followed by an off-Broadway production in 2018. How
did that collaboration come to be?

Erin
McKeown: It came in
a really cool way, actually. One of those things that’s kind of an
unpredictable sum of all the relationships you’ve had before [laughs]. I made a
record called Hundreds of Lions in 2009. Quiara had written a play
around the same time called 26 Miles. A couple of years later, she
decided she wanted to make that straight play into a musical. She asked friends
of hers for names of some female singer / songwriters to whom she should be
listening. Her best friend from growing up went to college with me (at Brown),
though I didn’t know her personally. I was known on campus for making music.
This friend of hers put my name on a list and gave it to Quiara. At the time, Hundreds
of Lions was new. She heard that record and thought that’s what she wanted
the musical to sound like. She wrote me an email through the catch-all email on
my website, which is generally filled with spam [laughs], but her email came
through. It said, “From one Brown grad to another, I have this play that I want
to turn into a musical. By the way, I have a Tony (Award) and I’m a serious
writer.” That’s how it happened! I’d never gotten an email like that in my
life. I answered it and she came to see my show in New York the next day. We
had lunch and she gave me the script of the play and I just said, “Yes.” I had
no idea that it would be a seven-year process.

The
timely subject matter couldn’t have arrived on stage at a more opportune
moment, especially while we are living in Trump world. Can you please say
something about that?

For
folks that are undocumented and for people who care about our immigration
system, this is something that’s been going on for a long time. For a group of
people, me included, it’s been very important for a long time. It’s been said
before, and it’s always important for me to say when addressing this topic,
Obama was not that great on immigration. He deported more people than any
previous administrations. For various reasons, there wasn’t any legislation
that was able to move forward. He’s not Trump.

But
he doesn’t get a pass, either.

That’s
correct. This is an issue that I care about and am interested in, and obviously
Quiara cared about it. That’s the thing we added to this story in 2011. There’s
no citizenship issue in the play. The mom in the play is Puerto Rican and
therefore an American citizen. When we turned it into a musical, we introduced
the immigration piece of it. I can only say that that happened because it was
important to us, not because something was happening in the news. Then it
became news and was growing in waves. I think it cuts both ways, to be totally
honest, with this show. I don’t necessarily think it’s a blessing to be putting
this show out at the same time as we have this person in the White House
putting out the kind of rhetoric he puts out. In one way, it’s super important
that we are here, telling the kind of story that we’re telling, in some way
pushing against that tide. In other ways, in my personal opinion, there’s also
a type of fatigue or desire to look away because what we’re seeing in the news
is so difficult. Many people look to entertainment for some escape and we’re
not offering that. We’re offering people a chance to look more closely at
something that’s difficult; to open their hearts to something that’s difficult.
I don’t think everyone wants to do that.

Do
you see it as being on par with the protest music of the 1960s?

Absolutely!
I see it something that we had to make and there’s no way that we would not
make it, regardless of what’s happening in the political landscape. We were
compelled and we made the show we wanted to make and it says the things we
wanted it to say. In that way, it’s inevitable and we are compelled by it. When
we look back at these Trump years and we ask ourselves, “What did we do to
help?” I will proudly say we made this show.

As
a singer / songwriter yourself, what are the challenges and rewards of writing
songs for others, especially characters in a play, to sing, and how do you
think that having written for the stage will impact your songwriting for your
own recordings and performance?

The
challenges for me were mostly in the length of the project and the amount of
revisions. Music is on such a shorter cycle and there’s a kind of elasticity
and looseness and nightly reinvention. Theater is a different animal. I’ve
never revised anything as much as I revised and continued to chip away at this
project. It was a personal thing. The reward is that I think we were able to
make something that is extremely rich and has a ton of depth that comes from
spending that much time on something. It was a great lesson. Everything I make
after this musical will certainly be impacted by that. I have learned to sit
with something longer. I have learned to give more time and space to something.
I can still write a quick song, if I have to. But I’ve really seen the benefits
of this kind of marination and slow edits. I also loved writing for other
characters which wasn’t too far a stretch from the things I’ve been making for
years. Even though I may use an I or me pronoun, I’ve been writing about other
things and perspectives within my work. I enjoyed the distance of getting to
physically sit between ten and 100 feet from my music. To have it come out of
someone else’s body and feel the reflection of that, rather than having to
produce it myself, was inspiring and enlivening. If my goal is to help connect
people, I have an opportunity to connect more people if I don’t have to be
personally involved. That’s the thing about which I feel most excited about
this phase of the show. I don’t have to be there for it and people can carry
this show and this message like little seed pods that get to disperse. There’s
a lot of openness and flexibility for the people performing this music and
plenty of room for a performer to make each of these songs their own. That’s
always a style I’ve been interested in. Not only do I not have to be there, but
there’s room for any of these individual performers doing this show to bring
their self to it.

I’m
so glad you mentioned that because I was wondering what was it like to have
Daphne Rubin-Vega, who made her Broadway debut as Mimi in Rent, singing
your songs?

[Laughs]
Oh, goodness. That is has been one of the hugest gifts for me. I could talk
about her for 100 years and not be finished with the depth of her artistry and
her intelligence and the things that she brings and does as a musician that
I’ve never heard anyone else do. She is a legend. But maybe to a smaller group
of people than she should be. She’s a transformational performer and it’s been
a joy to collaborate with her in the way that we have. A production of this
show is going to running in Boston. It’s the first time that someone other than
Daphne has played Beatriz. She has been with us from our very first workshop
and through every workshop, production and rehearsal. Beatriz is a creation of
Daphne and me and Quiara. She’s right in there with that. Maybe it’s basic of
me to say this, but I wish more people knew about her. She deserves that.

The
gays know about her, that’s for sure.

I
know! We always know where the good stuff is.

Do
you foresee writing more for the stage?

Yes,
in February (2019), I actually have a workshop reading of a new musical for
which I wrote book, lyrics and music scheduled. I’m already on my way with a
new musical project.

Is
there a new Erin McKeown album in the works?
Yes, there is. Given what I learned from Miss
You Like Hell, I’m going to let it take the time it’s going to take. I
started working on it and I know what it’s about. I’m super-excited about it
and it’s personal. In some ways I have worried in the past that people wouldn’t
be as interested if I just kept writing about myself; that somehow I needed to
be doing stuff in service of other people’s stories. I have been able to do
that with this musical, and it’s been great. But my roots are excavating my own
biography and my own self to make music, so I’m working on a project that
returns to those roots.

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Author Profile

Gregg Shapiro

Gregg Shapiro is the author of Fifty Degrees (Seven Kitchens, 2016), selected by Ching-In Chen as co-winner of the Robin Becker Chapbook Prize. Other books by Shapiro include the short story collections How to Whistle (Lethe Press, 2016) and Lincoln Avenue (Squares and Rebels Press, 2014), the chapbook GREGG SHAPIRO: 77 (Souvenir Spoon Press, 2012), and the poetry collection Protection (Gival Press, 2008).

He has work forthcoming in the anthology Reading Queer: Poetry in a Time of Chaos (Anhinga Press, 2018). An entertainment journalist, whose interviews and reviews run in a variety of regional LGBT and mainstream publications and websites, Shapiro lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida with his husband Rick and their dog Coco.